(1081–1151). Abbot of Saint-Denis from 1122 to 1151, Suger is one of the most interesting representatives of French monastic culture in the 12th century, combining an extraordinary devotion to his monastery with an understanding of the weaknesses and potential strengths of the kings of France. He was an ardent administrator and builder, and, if he is best remembered for his desire to adorn his church, he also reformed the liturgy and improved the life of the community, earning the praise of Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux.
Suger also stands out from most of his contemporaries because of the much clearer picture we have of his personality and achievements. He himself wrote a Latin vita of Louis VI, in which he gives a vivid picture of the king’s attempts to subdue the turbulent aristocracy in the Paris region, his own role in this process, and the king’s special devotion to St. Denis. He also wrote two works concerning his administration of the monastery’s lands and the building and consecration of the new church. A small number of his charters and letters survive, and his image and his words are preserved in several places in the church of his abbey.
Suger’s eagle vase, Saint-Denis. Courtesy of the Louvre, Paris, Rèunion des Musées Nationaux.
Suger was born of a modest knightly family probably not too far from Saint-Denis and was given as an oblate to the abbey. During his early years, he seems to have realized how the abbey had lost prestige, power, and wealth since the time of Charlemagne and Charles the Bald; how the reciprocal devotion of saint and king had been a strength to both; and how the church’s small size and decayed furnishings no longer served the needs of the monks or the crowds of pilgrims coming there. Throughout his long life and particularly during his abbacy, it was his purpose to remedy these three lacks.
Suger tells us how as a youth he used to look at the abbey’s muniments and how he was aware not only of its lost domains, but also how through mismanagement it was receiving much less revenue than it should. The first portion of his book on the administration of the abbey, De rebus in administratione sua gestis, described how he carefully and painstakingly tried to recover what was owed to the abbey and to increase its revenues. For example, increases came from getting more revenues from the town of Saint-Denis or acquiring a wealthy priory like Argenteuil,
Suger’s chalice, Saint-Denis. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
but they also came from clearing forests, planting new crops and vines, settling new inhabitants on the land, enforcing ancient rights against the encroachments of local lords, building houses, granges, and courts, establishing new churches, and converting cash rents into payments in kind.
Suger also learned from the monastery’s history that it had been a frequent beneficiary of royal munificence. Lands, money, and precious objects had been given to Saint-Denis by kings of France from Dagobert on. He knew, too, that it was in times of peace and harmony that Saint-Denis had prospered most. An opportunity to recreate that special harmony between king and abbot arose from the fact that Louis VI, once a pupil at the abbey, had a particular devotion to the martyrs and confidence in Suger. Although Suger was to become regent while Louis VII was on crusade, and it was then that he acted as a royal “minister” of the king, it was really during the reign of Louis VI (d. 1137) that troublesome enemies of both king and abbey, like the lords of Le Puiset, were brought to heel. The ancient relationship between regnum and monasterium was not only enhanced but refashioned when Louis VI returned the crown of his father, Philip I, to Saint-Denis; took the royal standard from the abbey’s altar as he left for war in 1124, declaring that if he were not king he would do homage to the abbey; granted the fair of the Lendit what amounted to an immunity from royal justice; and declared that the kings of France should be buried at Saint-Denis.
The more rigorous administration of the monastic lands and the creation of symbols that emphasized Saint Denis’s special importance for the French were antecedent to Suger’s intention to tear down the old church and replace it with a larger one with more splendid hangings, stained glass, altars, crosses, and other objects. Though this must have long been planned for, Suger tells in his De consecratione ecclesie sancti Dionisii that once construction started the work proceeded quickly, the western narthex and towers being consecrated in 1140, and the translation of the saints to their new reliquaries and the construction of the eastern end with the new ambulatory and stained-glass windows completed in 1144. If stylistically the chevet anticipates many features of the Gothic churches of the Île-de-France, the church also incorporates many of Suger’s major concerns: the preservation of the past, a harmonious adaptation of the old to the new, an emphasis on the liturgy, and most of all the exaltation of the saints.
Suger was inventive and eclectic. He reshaped and adorned objects that had been in the church; if he was not given the precious stones he needed, he bought them. So, too, he found the sources for his conception of the church in writings as diverse as saints’ lives, liturgical texts, biblical commentaries, chronicles, and the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, as well as in buildings he had seen.
Suger was a small man and an assertive one, and on behalf of his church he considered any means legitimate. In his last years, as regent, he had had to spend much of his time away from Saint-Denis, and money that had been intended for the rebuilding of the nave he used for the king’s needs. He died at Saint-Denis in 1151.
Suger. Vie de Louis VI le Gros (Vita Ludovici VI), ed. and trans. Henri Waquet. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1929.
——. Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis and Its Art Treasures, ed. and trans. Erwin Panofsky. 2nd ed. Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1979. [Liber de rebus in administratione sua gestis, chs. xxiv–xxxiv; Libellus de consecratione Sancti Dionysii; Ordinatio.]
Bur, Michel. Suger, abbé de Saint-Denis, régent de France. Paris: Perrin, 1991.
Cartellieri, Otto. Abt Suger von Saint-Denis, 1081–1151. Berlin: Ebering, 1898.
Gerson, Paula L., ed. Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis: A Symposium. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986.
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